Stands made of cardboard material are commonly used for displaying merchandise. They are cost effective and convenience to use. Such stands have a large planar board supported by an easel. The board may have an attractive advertising design shown on its front surface for attracting customers' attention and may also have provision for displaying merchandise hung on hooks and/or held in trays mounted to the board. The easel has an L-shaped or T-shaped leg portion for supporting the planar board to stand in a substantially vertical position. One common drawback of such stands is that the L-shaped or T-shaped leg portion of the easel is rather small in size relative to the planar board and are not strong in construction such that it may break easily in use rendering the stands unusable.
Some stands are foldable along horizontal fold lines to a compact collapsed condition for convenient storage and transportation and may also be self-erecting from the folded condition to an erected condition for easy set up of the display. The self-erecting function is provided by a plurality of elastic bands mounted directly between parallel vertical side walls of the easel. The stand and the easel may be folded in the collapsed condition by stretching the elastic bands against their elastic force, and the stand in the collapsed folded condition may be erected by holding its top portion and raising it upwards to allow the stretched elastic bands to pull the stand and easel quickly to the erected condition. It has been very problematic to select the acceptable elastic bands that may allow the stand to be folded easily as well as subsequently self-erecting. The elastic bands must not have too strong an elastic strength so that the stand and the easel may be folded with ease yet they must have a sufficient elastic strength to return the folded stand and easel to the erected condition. Another problem is that due to the direct mounting of the elastic bands between the side walls of the easel, they would cause these side walls to deform or tear at the mounting locations resulting in the loss of the integrity or strength of the side walls to support the planar board in the erected condition.
Another further common problem with self-erecting stands and easel is that the cardboard material in the folded condition retains a folded memory such that it cannot be unfolded readily to the erected condition by the elastic force of the elastic bands.